Well radio silence is over and I can now announce that the “closed beta” version of the game is now public. Its actually not closed in any sense, anyone can play =)

All game elements are in place and (hopefully) operational. Content is not final yet. There is only beginning of the campaing, approximetely abou 15-30 minutes of game play.

I have se up an internal feedback system, so when you test the game, feel free to give feedback with it, its simple and easy.

So, go try it! ( just click the “Latest Build” tab, its there…)

Yes, no updates lately, but that’s because I have been extra busy with the project. I have added some new floorplans, made a major change to the combat system, finalized the minion system and lots of other stuff, like UI polishing. I’ll post more details later, here is just a fast screengab showing a floorplan with waterline and a bridge – or pier or such.

Yes, the shopping feature is now done! And I also made some small features I have been planning for quite long time.

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I have managed to arrange some more time to spend with the game development and things are looking bright.

I made a big refactoring round and I now have all item and NPC statistics in one place, so tweaking the game balance will be easy and … well easy. Perhaps fun even.

I also started working on the last big feature to add, e.g. shop functionality. After 1 day of work, it is in pretty good shape already. There is preliminary UI set up, and items can be transferred between shop and inventory. Also there is support for different kind of item selections. I estimate it will be more or less done after another full day of coding & bug fixing. Most notable bug now is that items purchasd are not stored in savegame.

Here is a screengrab of the Shop UI. Its pretty straightforward, hovering mouse over items will show descriptions, and clicking an item will show a confirmation popup:

… yep, there is a  nice selection of weapons to choose from =)

There is a new build up for testing, so why not check it out? There is lots of added stuff, like sound effects, auto-generated dungeons, etc etc. And some bugs, but I’ll squish them sooner or later.

Well, yes, I should be bugfixing and polishing the game, and writing storyline, but no. Instead, I have been playing around with Flash, trying to set up NPC face generator.

Im not sure if this is something that will be in the game, but maybe I’ll use it in some other project in future. But anyway, this is fun to do stuff, and despite there are just couple of eyes, head shapes and only one mouth, nose and hair style, the characters look promising:

Yeah,  eyes look bit dull, and lips should have changing colors and so on, but this is just first step to set the system up.  I think the hair “shine” is pretty believeable, and also shadowing is not bad. Fun stuff to do, I must say.

I did some fast work on the castle tile set I found lying around some time ago, and they look quite good. I also created simplified version of the tree system – earlier one created trees dynamically  using recursive code. Now I just have 10 different tree types, and the type used is based on the last digit of  the tree x position in the map. Its simple and fast.

I also have done some more polishing of the user interface. So this is how the game now looks:

Not bad at all, is my verdict. Well the area shown is sort of testbed for new things, so its bit messy, but the overall look is quite ok. Im not sure if the color scheme for the ui is best possible, but it’ll have to do for now.

I’m back from vacation and working again. What i’m up right now to is new improved user interface.

There will be data about weapon and shield values, showing different attack and armor values for all types of possible damage, here’s a screengrab of w.i.p UI bar:

…well the damage type icons are just fast 2-minute sketches, but you get the idea, I hope. Also Map and Bag icons are now more prominent and look polished enough actually. Health bar ( the ank in the middle) needs some more work, but is looking promising.

Codewise there are some bugs to fix, as usual. But things are looking good – as long as I dont set up a deadline for release =P

Well suddenly I have been doing lots of progress, and the game is feeling quite complete now, featurewise. I have added several sound effects, some new monsters, And I’m in middle of finalizing the User Interface.

There will be  weapon stats and armor stats shown in the UI, so one doesen’t need to guess too much how potent the weapons and shields are. But to keep things interesting, there is no details given about monster armor and attack values.

Weapons and shields have 6 different armor  values: normal,fire,ice,poison,holy,electric and acid. And similarly, weapons have same 6 attack values. so there is plenty room for different attribute combos.

Here is fast screenshot of battle taking place in a dungeon. Try to guess which attack type the monster is using =)

Yep, the UI is now bit sketchy, but going to right direction imo.

Also, I have comissioned a splash screen image work. I think it will be sweet!

No updates here lately, but that does not mean that I have been lazy, quite the opposite. Well I have been little bit lazy, true. But I have also made lots of improvements, and once again it seems that the game is “nearly ready”.

I have been working on randomized dungeon creation algorithm, and its working as planned. One needs to determine dungeonLevels, roomsInLevel and the code takes care rest of the process, creating rooms, monsters, loot, connecting rooms with teleports and so on.

Well as alwas there are some minor bugs to deal with, but they probably will be easy to fix.

But all in all, I now have full set of features done, and there will be a game. Only major thing I might want to add is shop system.

Here is screenshot showing dungeon with randomly generated doors and stairs – there are lots of “blue boxes”, placeholders for teleports. They will naturally be hidden once I clean up the code.